Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (7 page)

The most important of these “Loft babies” was Nicky Siano. Siano was a young kid from Coney Island in love with music who first went to the Loft at age fifteen. The following year he landed a DJ gig at a club called the Round Table but was so unimpressed with the setup that he decided to open his own club in the Loft’s image, but with a commercial imperative. Securing financing with the help of his brother, Siano opened the Gallery (also called the This & That Gallery) on Twenty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues in 1973 (the club later moved to 172 Mercer Street). If Francis Grasso was the Chuck Berry of the turntables, Siano was the Jimi Hendrix. Siano built on Grasso’s innovations and took them to new realms of expressivity and intensity. Playing on three turntables (while controlling the club’s lights with foot pedals), he would take records like Gloria Spencer’s gospel stormer “I Got It” and stretch it completely out of shape. Siano would work the crowd up to fever pitch by playing two copies of “I Got It,” extending until breaking point the beginning where Spencer screams over the piston-pumping cymbals that would become familiar a few years later from both the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power” and, more bizarrely, Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut.” He achieved a similar crowd response when he mixed MFSB’s “Love Is the Message” (which he turned into “the national anthem of New York”
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) with a sound-effect record featuring a jet plane taking off.
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Siano was also credited with pioneering the use of varispeed turntables in club DJing. Previously the preserve of the avant-garde (John Cage’s
Imaginary Landscape No. 1
uses a varispeed turntable to create an eerie tone poem portraying an Yves Tanguy–style topography), the vari-speed turntable enabled Siano to create a world that was just as far-fetched as that of the avant-gardists, but he used it to create order and neatness rather than wild, otherworldly sounds. Taking advantage of the turntable’s ability to vary its speed, and thus the pitch and tempo of the record it’s playing, Siano was able to craft mixes and blends that were almost letter-perfect. In Siano’s hands, the transitions between songs were no longer the awkward herky-jerky, sputtering dance floor moments (like trying to change gears without using the clutch) they used to be; they were now taut, well-defined, and smooth—kind of like the ideal male body on the dance floor. It would be hard to overstate the impact of this on the DJing scene. A whole new world was created; reputations were destroyed and made in the flash of a cross-fade.

Siano also shaped the direction of what would soon be called disco music. He loved deep, deep bass and had Alex Rosner design him a sound system with forbiddingly dark, bowel-quaking bass reproduction and crossover points on his mixing board so he could isolate the treble, midrange, and bass of a record. Siano’s sound was reflected in the spartan decor of his club. Although it was decorated with streamers and balloons à la the Loft, the Gallery had minimal lighting that would be used only during key moments of certain songs. The occasional rhythmic flashes of light would punctuate the festivities, paralleling the surging energy of the records, and carry the dancers out of the penumbra up to heights of dizzying incandescence. More than any DJ before him, Siano homed in on the break. While the percussive breakdowns of records were focal points in the sets of Grasso and Mancuso, Siano pushed this aesthetic over the top. Grasso and Mancuso both built up to the breaks, but Siano attacked them right from the get-go and played his favorite parts of a record over and over and over and over again by using two copies at once. Like the free jazz cats who congregated in similar loft spaces to explore parallel limits of physical and spiritual release, punk rockers accelerating three chords into immolating infinity, and Bronx hip-hoppers contorting themselves into new shapes by dancing to their own, more explosive break beats, Siano created a dark whorl of sound, a vortex of tribal drums and propulsive bass murmurs that was at once exhilarating and menacing.

But he also loved over-the-top female vocals, and if anyone can be credited with bringing the diva to the dance it is Siano. Records featuring either rousing, “gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” don’t-do-me-wrong vocals, or breathy, soft-focus coos of postcoital bliss by Gloria Spencer, Genie Brown, Faith, Hope & Charity singer Zulema, Ecstasy, Passion & Pain, Thelma Houston, Minnie Riperton, Diana Ross, and LaBelle all got extensive airings at the Gallery. In essence, Siano was the bridge between the intense, rather serious music of the earliest days of disco and the cheery music of airheaded levity that it became in the popular imagination. The characteristic interplay between the sheer ecstasy or thrilling exorcism of the vocalist and a creeping, dark undertow that marked out the very best disco music was first pinpointed by Siano.

“YOU’RE JUST THE RIGHT SIZE”

The Art of the Mix and the Development of the Twelve-inch Single

While DJs always wanted longer records with longer percussive passages (one of the many reasons why album tracks, rather than singles, were so important in the earliest days of disco), Nicky Siano’s mixing advances at the Gallery made this even more imperative. The traditional seven-inch forty-five is difficult to handle when in the middle of the fray of a DJ set. On top of that, its tight, compressed grooves wear out faster than those on albums and they just don’t sound as good in a big room with lots of space to fill. The whirling dervish trance ritual that was developing in these New York clubs also demanded extended tracks of a more diffuse, prolonged intensity than the standard three-minute wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am pop single—dancing from midnight until six in the morning at the Loft or the Gallery was a very different proposition from the midday blood-sugar rush of the sock hops or the drunken, stumbling toga parties of old.

One of the first people to recognize this new paradigm was, ironically, an old music biz hand who had left the industry in disgust at its duplicitousness and was pursuing a career in modeling instead. Yet however much he was identified as Camel’s answer to the Marlboro Man or the face of classic tailors Hart, Schaffner & Marx, Tom Moulton always identified himself through music. “Without music I’m dead,” he says. “That’s my whole life. That’s who my lover is, that’s who my mistress is, that’s everything.”
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Moulton grew up in Schenectady, New York, about thirty-five miles down the road from David Mancuso in Utica, and was a music buff from a very young age. “I was always used to hearing the white versions of the black songs, but when ‘Earth Angel’ by the Penguins came out, oh, my God,” he reminisces. “I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, that’s really something.’ The next record I really went nuts over was ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’’ by Little Richard, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, something’s happening here because white people sure don’t play like that.’”
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His love of black music eventually led to a job in sales and promotion for King Records from 1959 to 1961, where he worked with James Brown, Freddie King, and Hank Ballard.

But after similar jobs with RCA and United Artists, Moulton got fed up with “the bullshit, the ass-kissing, the insincerity” and started working for the Bookings and, later, the Ford modeling agencies. “There was this guy John Whyte who was at the same agency I was and owned the Botel on Fire Island [a predominantly gay summer community about fifty miles from New York City],” Moulton remembers of the fateful event in 1972 that would change not only his life but eventually the entire course of music history. “A friend told me I should go out there and check out the music that people were dancing to [at the Sunday Tea Party]. So I went out there and I thought, ‘Okay, this is very Villagey, bohemian.’ And they’re listening to
soul
music. I’m watching these white people really getting off on this music. And I’m really observing them, and, of course, all the songs are like two and a half, three minutes long, and I notice how everything is like ‘one-two-three-four,’ and they’d always leave the floor on ‘one.’ They’d always walk off [because the clumsy mixing interrupted the momentum and flow]. I’m thinking, it’s a shame, ’cause you could almost sense an emotional reaction there, but it wasn’t long enough to get it out. So I thought, ‘I’m going to try something.’ And I went to John and said, ‘You got a tape machine, right? I’m going to try something and see if it works.’”
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The result of his experimentation was a forty-five-minute tape of perfectly mixed music with no skips, no awkward transitions, nothing played at the wrong speed, no DJ saying, ‘Whoops!’ It took him eighty hours to make. “But it was flawless,” Moulton beams. He spent his two working weeks painstakingly reediting, recrafting, and blending with a razor blade, Scotch tape, and varispeed turntable records by Ann Peebles, Syl Johnson, the Detroit Emeralds, and obscure records on tiny labels that he found in Oakland, California. “He would do it on an old Wollensak recorder,” recalls Barry Lederer, a DJ and soundman who sometimes watched Moulton at work. “Since he couldn’t blend [i.e., he didn’t have a mixer], he would actually count out the beats of a song with his feet, and as it came to the end he would make the next song come in on the right one, two, three, four, beat … and this worked.”
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He doubled the length of the records and stretched out the grooves so that the dancers just couldn’t hide (or walk off the floor). “It was mostly new stuff,” Moulton remembers, “stuff that I liked, but I knew there were certain songs that had that ‘I’ve gotta get up and move to this no matter what.’ I’d always start with that kind of a song where people would want to dance to that, and then you could start taking them on this trip. What I would use was this varispeed and start speeding up slowly so you’d never know. And then I go into the next song, so that by the end of the forty-five minutes you could peel them off the walls, they were screaming and yelling.”

Well, that didn’t exactly happen when Moulton gave the tape to Whyte. As Moulton recalls: “He wouldn’t play it. John hands the tape back to me and says, ‘Don’t give up your day job.’ So I had the tape in hand and I was sitting waiting for the boat to take me back to the mainland. This guy came over to me and said, ‘Did somebody just die?’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone look so down in my entire life. What’s the matter?’ I kind of explained the story to him. He says, ‘Listen, I don’t do the music here [at the Sandpiper restaurant and bar], but my partner does. If you want, I’ll give him the tape and see what happens. Give me your phone number and address and we’ll send it to you.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, I get this call at quarter to one in the morning. ‘Hello.’ ‘They hate the tape.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ I guess I was on the wrong track here. The next night—I should say the next morning—I get a call at two in the morning. It sounds like someone in a stadium. ‘They love the tape.’ I hung up, thinking these people are sick. They call back like five or six times, and I keep hanging up. The next day, I get a call: ‘Hi, my name is Ron Malcolm and I love your tape.’ ‘But someone called me on Friday.’ ‘That was me.’ ‘I thought you said they hated the tape.’ ‘They did … You know when people come out here on a Friday night, they gotta fight the city traffic, then the Long Island Expressway, then they gotta take a boat. They just want to come down. They don’t want to come down to things they don’t know. They want things to be familiar. The next day, they’re ready to party, and they want some new stuff. That’s why yours worked so well because you got them with the one song and then you took them somewhere they’d never been before. What I’d like you to do is do a tape a week.’ And I was like, ‘Forget it. I don’t work eighty hours a week for anybody. That’s very difficult to do.’ He said, ‘We’ll give you five hundred dollars a tape.’ I said, ‘You can give me ten thousand a tape, that’s not the problem. It’s time.’ He said, ‘Can we work out an arrangement where you give us an hour-and-a-half tape just for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day?’ ‘Oh, okay. I think I can do that.’ I didn’t realize how fast those holidays come. I just got one done and then it’s the Fourth of July. I had to make a living too. I said, ‘This is crazy. How did I agree to do this?’ That’s basically how it got started, but I had no idea what I was doing. I just had this idea to do something a certain way, and it worked. When I think about it now, I really had a lot of balls to do something like that.”
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At around the same time as Moulton started making his tapes for the Sandpiper, the sale of reel-to-reel tapes of DJ sets started in New York City. These tapes, which the DJs often made as backups in case something went wrong with their turntables, sold for between $30 and $75 apiece. Claiming that Manhattan’s trendy beauty parlors and cafés that wanted an alternative to Muzak for background music were the main customers of the tapes,
Billboard
magazine, the voice of the American record industry, decried the copyright violation inherent in the practice and the illegality of the trade.
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Soon enough, though, the record companies wanted in on the action. The first “legitimate” mixed compilation was Spring’s
Disco Par-r-r-ty,
which was released in 1974. “There’s a new spirit at work here,” the liner notes trumpeted. “Something more in tune with the spirit of the times … and the tastes of the
now
audience … A spirit which has pulled out all the stops … We’re having a party and everybody’s invited.”
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While the selection of tracks was a pretty accurate reflection of what was being played in discotheques at the time—Barry White, James Brown, Joe Simon, the Chakachas, and the Peppers—the “mixing” was pretty appalling (the songs just scrunched together as if they were on a crowded bus and there was no DJ credited on the album, not that any self-respecting discaire would have wanted to be associated with it) despite the claim that the album was “tight and distinctive … professional and polished … never contrived or stylized.”
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Needless to say, it couldn’t hold a cross-fader to one of Moulton’s meticulously crafted tapes.